Tuesday, March 14, 2017

In Spain Ibáñez was the " King of Comics "

It is kind of strange that two people who had a big influence on my life - pop sexbomb Sabrina Salerno and Francisco Ibáñez - share a birthday and since I already did the re - post of italian cult siren Sabrina Salerno I want to seize the chance to pay homage to one of the great comic masters.

Especially since I do not think he is well known outside of Europe. In his native country of Spain he is of course a legend and he is also very present in the german comic market since a lot of his series have been translated here, especially his most famous series MORTADELO Y FILEMON about two very special secret agents which was published under names like FLIP UND FLAP although they are best known as CLEVER & SMART which was coined by the Condor Verlag which published their adventures here for decades.

Now since I already had a lot of material which I prepared for a post on MORTADELO Y FILEMON I thought the bulk of the post would be a few covers from Ibáñez´ other series and lots of MORTADELO Y FILEMON covers. But then I went on the internet looking for more stuff from his other comics and while I knew that he did a lot of spin offs and crossovers ( the character from his series always appeared in other series and the successful ones got their own series ) I had no idea how many series he actually had done and so the more I found the less stuff from MORTADELO Y FILEMON could be included in the post. While I am not going to do the lengthy post I had planned in my head y still wanted to show the range of Ibáñez´ work while putting more covers from MORTADELO Y FILEMON on the blog. In the end I have decided to do two posts, this one which will include stuff from all of his series and a second one which will go online Tomorrow AFTER the Sabrina Salerno post and that one will be all about the cover layouts of MORTADELO Y FILEMON from different countries.

Since not all of Ibáñez comic strips got their own magazine I had to use a lot of interior pages for those and I also included some for the series that relied on visual gags or page layout. I have used covers where I could.

Since I had to do quite a lot of research for this post there is a long list of Thank Yous for all the fine people out there who have provided all the necessary material starting with EL BLOG DE JUAN A. ROS which provided the double page spread from La Familia Repollino above and also the page from the comic Doña Pura y Doña Pera, vecina de escalera . The page from Godofredo y Pascualino with the ad for Capitan Trueno Extra de Verano was found on TEBEOSYTEBEOS where you can find many more pages and also an archive of every character Bruguera ever published . Speaking of the Bruguera series you can find a lot of pages from Anacleto, Agente Secreto at COMICRAZYS and 13 RUE BRUGUERA has an article on Sir Tim O´Theo by Joan Rafart Roldán that british readers might find interesting.

And apropos interesting reads, TEENAGE THUNDER has a post on the epic crossover with Zipi y Zape in the pages of Mortadelo y Filemon and as we are on the subject of crossovers, FANCUEVA has a post on the on another Mortadelo y Filemon interaction with another comic. This time it´s El Capitan Trueno and during the story Mortadelo shows what a stud he is by scoring with Capitan Trueno´s female companion Sigrid. Way to go, mack !

Speaking about Mortadelo´s adventures with the ladies, MORTADELO Y ALGO MAS has an article on Irma, the blonde sexbomb with the Sophia Loren measurements that was introduced in the late 80s as a counterpoint to overweight and choleric secretary Ofelia and speaking of Irma, ADLO has a post on Los Superpoderes where she appeared in underwear which certainly was one of the high water marks in spanish comic book history.

I also want to include the link for EL DIBUJANTES WEBLOG which has a post on F. Ibáñez´ first works, the aptly named COMIC IS ART has more F. Ibáñez art, TEBEOSFERA presents a Rompetechos cover gallery, you can find a super extensive article about the role of women and children in the pages of comic publisher Bruguera on DE TODO UN POCO with tons of pics by a whole plethora of diverse artists of which some may find their way into future posts on this blog and there´s also a post on Zipi y Zape .

And for more about spanish comics just go to FACTORIA DEL COMIC . As this goes online before the Sabrina Salerno re - post I want to include a few birthdays that I did not get to mention in that post beginning with Bob Budiansky who turns 63. Which started out as kind of an error since I thought he was the guy who did the inks on the first american Captain America issues I read when in fact he is best known for his work on Marvel´s Transformer series and co - creating Sleepwalker, one of my favorite comics from the 90s. Oh, he also wrote all issues of that series.

We make the jump to Germany with underground artist Gerhard Seyfried who has his 69th birthday ahead of him. Here you don´t have to explain who he is since his cartoon collections Freakadellen und Bulleten and his comic Invasion aus dem Alltag are required reading for all school kids. And since his complete works have been collected in omnibus hardcovers long before Marvel ever had the idea he´s part of most german bookshelves.

To complete the comic book artist birthday trifecta - or rather quartet if you count Francisco Ibanez - a final shoutout goes to the late Dan Adkins.

If you are a fan of Marvel´s ESSENTIAL line or the MARVEL MASTERWORKS - or now the Epic Collections - his name will pop up there constantly since he not only drew a lot of the issues in the Silver Age but also inked all the greats like John Buscema, Gene Colan, Gil Kane or John Byrne to name just a few. He really deserves a post of his own but as usual all the pages I have from him are dispersed over many folders. It´s impossibly to squeeze an entire career into a few paragraphs but luckily THE COMICS JOURNAL has an extensive biography on Dan Adkins and the always reliable folks at TWOMORROWS have two interviews with Dan Adkins, one conducted by Roy Thomas about his work with Wally Wood from Alter Ego Vol 3 issue 8 and one by John B. Cooke about his work on the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents series from Comic Book Artist issue 14 . And if you ask yourself why you should check out the work of this comic icon here is my favorite Doctor Strange cover by Gene Colan - possibly the first I saw - which he inked.

Speaking of Doctor Strange, as I´m always late to the party I have only now managed to watch the movies since it is finally out on DVD and Blue Ray and I have to say I liked it. They didn´t pull off the Ditkoesque parts in my opinion but I have to say that while I understand Comicbookgirl19´s reaction this is the negative aspects of having a shared universe. You can not go all out trippy reality bending bat - s - word crazy when you know you have to appeal to people who are more into the other more normal superhero movies. If this was a standalone thing you could go bonkers like Grant Morrison on peyote but as it is you have to make some concessions.

Now La Casera did not only make some printed ads in the 13 Rue del Percebe style, they also made a slew of tv spots with all the characters.

If you are not familiar with that series you can either use the tags to go back and read my old posts or watch this two minute video. By the way, in Rivas there really exists a building with the address 13 Rue del Percebe .

There are a few videos with Francisco Ibáñez and this is a short one where he talks about how he started and you also get to see him draw.

We have to leave the originally scheduled Peret video for another day in favor of another entry in the Best News Caster In The World series and Today´s candidate is albanian sexbomb Enki Bracaj who replaced another hot sexbomb by wearing this hot outfit for her job interview that openly showed everything mother nature had given her in such abundance.

As I already said, I am always late to the party because this was apparently a global news story which I somehow missed. Since she does not have a wikipedia page and there is not much information about her on the net I can´t tell you her cupsize ( but my guess is it´s beyond DD somewhere from E to G ) and all I could find out is that she was supposedly suspended after she commented on accepting an offer to pose nude for PLAYBOY.

Since then her boss has come forth and issued a statement that she was not suspended because of the PLAYBOY offer but for complaining about her image as a cheap blow up sex doll and that had a negative effect on her performance. She can have her job back at any time and if her news casting improves she can even do the PLAYBOY pics. Now I don´t know how much of that is true but I have read that his plan is to put more scantily clad busty news casters on the air to fight the oppression of the news media by the politicians. Talk about reporting the naked truth.

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About Me

Working stiff at day, secret crimefighting blogger at night I was born into a world I never made. I always loved comics and even wrote and drew some. Together with my brother who is much more interested in making comics we even self-published a comic called POWER FREAKS that is infamous in Germany. Due to financial troubles and artistic differences sadly there has been only one issue so far. Being more of a reader than a collector of comics I always read the foreign versions of the american comics what led me to start this little blog. If you have any comment ( or want to send me some review copies ) please drop me a line in the comment section or send me an e - mail.